from the about-time dept

It's kind of ridiculous that it's taken this long, but the EU Court of Justice has now made it clear that viewing stuff that is legally on the internet is not copyright infringement. We had written about this case a few months back, as an offshoot of the various cases against clipping service/aggregator Meltwater. This specific dispute involves the Newspaper Licensing Agency's (NLA) continuing argument with the Public Relations Consultants Association (PRCA), and NLA's absolutely insane assertion that on-screen and cached copies of articles online was copyright infringement unless there was a license. As we noted last year, the UK Supreme Court agreed that this was nutty, but asked the EU Court of Justice to weigh in to be sure.

And, thankfully, on this one the EUCJ got it right, saying that on-screen and cached copies don't require a special license:

Article 5 of Directive 2001/29/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council of 22 May 2001 on the harmonisation of certain aspects of copyright and related rights in the information society must be interpreted as meaning that the copies on the user’s computer screen and the copies in the internet ‘cache’ of that computer’s hard disk, made by an end-user in the course of viewing a website, satisfy the conditions that those copies must be temporary, that they must be transient or incidental in nature and that they must constitute an integral and essential part of a technological process, as well as the conditions laid down in Article 5(5) of that directive, and that they may therefore be made without the authorisation of the copyright holders.

This is kind of important, because if the ruling had gone the other way, basically all of the internet would be infringing, and any time people loaded up anything in their web browsers, they'd likely be infringing. Kudos to the EUCJ for getting it right, but it's kind of crazy that we had to wait until now to make that clear...

from the you-must-pay-us-to-promote-us dept

Redlasso is an interesting company. Something of an online "clipping" service for television content, it has a nice web feature that allows users to do a search and find a relevant clip -- and to also embed that clip in your own website. It's been used to great effect by various sites that want to provide commentary on certain television content. The actions by Redlasso don't seem all that different than some old school TV clipping services, but (once again) the addition of "the internet" to the situation throws a legal wrench in things. NBC Universal and Fox are now suing Redlasso for violating copyrights.

This is especially odd since TV stations are in the business of attracting viewers, and giving people an easy way to promote your content to others (at absolutely no cost to you) would seem like a good plan for attracting more viewers. However, it would appear that the execs suing believe that companies should have to pay TV studios to promote their TV shows. Since it seems unlikely that the TV execs will recognize this any time soon, this particular case will hinge on the question of whether or not Redlasso can prove its claims that this use of clips is fair use. Update: As noted in the comments, the Redlasso has agreed to shut down the site, at least for now.